Talk

December 31, 2018  "2018"
What to say about the year gone by? Quoting Yeats? I wish not to. Listing successes? Possible, but inadequate. Crises...? Oh, well.

Let's see what tomorrow brings. There is always tomorrow.

December 19, 2018  "Loud"
I have just watched "It might get loud", a film about three guitarists, none of whom I was ever particularly interested in, before. What a wonderful film!

December 12, 2018  "Unintentional"
A few days ago a friend, T, called and told me excitedly that workers were building a chimney outside of his Berlin apartment window. Come see for yourself, he said. Today I did, and yes, it was worth it. I have never ever seen a construction of a chimney other than the ones I have built myself.

In this case what the workers are doing is reconstructing the chimney which used to stand on the building below, in which, once upon a time, the pressure for Berlin's pneumatic tube message service was generated. In other words, this tower is not supposed to be a work of art.

Having said that, there has been an unintended complication added to the project which is rather funny. The original chimney was 25 meters high. The client for the renovation of the old buildings surrounding it, wanted it rebuilt to the same size. The neighbours (except T and his wife) said "No way". A compromise was reacbe hed, where the new-old chimney will be ten meters high instead of twenty-five. Less high than the nearby apartment house.

The condition for making my chimneys "art" instead of "just" chimneys, is that there is always something "wrong" with them, be it scale, site or something else. Now, in this case, to have what looks like a functional industrial chimney standing next to an apartment house, yet not being less tall than the house – is as wrong as you can get, if you consider what a chimney's duty is. In other words, what my friends are getting outside of their window is an unintentional art work, an accidental chimney sculpture. Which is really appropriate, given the fight the two of them have pursued for the last two years to get permission to have me build "The Eleventh Chimney" at another site. That fight has now been lost, unfortunately.

December 8, 2018  "Bruegel"
Two days ago, with a group of students and teachers from the Angewandte I visited the
Bruegel exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I never had a particular interest for Bruegel, but I caught the communication about the show ("once in a lifetime") and thought it would be a good initiative. It wasn't easy to get tickets. Only with specified 20 minute timeslots and we got the only one still available (booking two weeks in advance). In the scramble outside the museum, waiting for all of our group to assemble, I felt nervous we were not going to get inside before our time was up. But it worked, we made it into the sixteenth century on time.

When I
take a group to a show or a museum I prefer to let everybody go through the show at their own pace. No guiding, no talking. See what is there for you, at your pace. In a blockbuster show unfortunately, you will be looking for whatever it is together with hundreds of others, which was the case here. (With some in the crowd remote controled by recorded instructions, such a horror.) In front of every painting or drawing you had to fight to come close. An absurd way to look at art. Yet at one moment it hit me how extraordinarily appropriate it was for this situation to occur at an exhibition of Bruegel, who so much celebrated ordinary people doing ordinary stuff, in masses. His paintings are never empty, they are full of folks, going about various sorts of business. If at that time almost five hundred years ago there would have existed art museums, and if Pieter Bruegel would have painted them (he surely would have), his painting may have looked just like what we people in 2018 created with our bodies.

It was an absolutely extraordinary experience to see this show, I don't care about the crowds. I was awed by an artist who completely transcended time to speak about our common concerns and shared reality, using pictures. These images were perfectly – contemporary. Never mind the changing objects and habits.

I had had no idea.

November 1, 2018  "Live"
The other night, I visited Internet Explorer, a club in Neukölln, here in Berlin. I was there with my friend Maria to see Say Sue Me, the band I encountered in Busan in September and which I have been listening to a lot ever since. Their two albums are without weak moments, so inspiring.

I have a particular memory of the first time I saw a band play in Neukölln. It was during my first ever visit to Berlin and I found a gig which looked promising in some listing. I was thrilled already going there (Neukölln – David Bowie!) and for that reason perhaps, I got so excited about the band, that I asked if I could interview them afterwards. Which they happily agreed to. Only problem was that I had got so drunk that the following day I couldn't read my notes. I actually contacted them and met up again however, and I did write a piece. It was a very, very, very long time ago.

This time was different: I was not drunk and I did not ask for an interview. The gig, however, was brilliant, just great. Another intensity than in Busan, where the audience had had no connection. Here they were playing in Berlin and there was something to prove. Sumi, the singer, was interacting more, and her singing is getting more forceful. Touring is good for your craft. They did absolutely prove themselves and Maria and I we felt that in times like these, this is what is truly real and valuable: people getting together and listening to live music. I was standing three meters from the stage. I so much hope that the people who were there (the club was full, but it was not a large space) included taste makers and networkers who will make sure this band will soon be back in Europe, in Berlin, in Vienna and at larger spaces. They deserve them!

October 15, 2018  "Culture"
One day after a possibly momentous election in Bavaria, I am there myself, walking together with the painter Bernd Zimmer through a bucolic landscape bathed in crystalline October light. It's so beautiful it almost hurts. We have never met before, although I have known of him since 1982 when an exhibition of the so-called "Junge Wilden" from Berlin, were shown in Stockholm. He was different from the others, because not focused on urban themes. Bernd Zimmer painted landscapes. I noticed. Today I'm the one who lives in Berlin (and not far from Moritzplatz), and Zimmer lives in a small village south of Munich. I'm here to find out more about a project in which I will take part next year. Like always, I let myself be guided by my curiosity and the conversation ranges far and wide. Explaining an aspect of painting, while still walking among those pastoral fields, Zimmer makes an off-hand analogy to music and refers to Johnny Moped. I know immediately what he means, while at the same time registering the extraordinariness of sharing such a reference. I have had no thought about Johnny Moped for forty years. Hardly even then.

October 9, 2018  "Banksy"
There's the new UN report on climate change; there's the Brazilian election; there's the paralysis in forming a new government in Sweden; there's the American president apologizing "on behalf of the nation" to a judge who has been asked questions about credible, but impossible to prove, accusations of sexual violations in the past. There's all that, and more, and then there is Banksy who pulls another stunt on... well, on whom, exactly? The fact that his 2006 "Girl with Balloon" framed spray painting (half-) shredded itself immediately after having been sold for a record price at Sotheby's four days ago, could easily – but naively – be seen as a metaphorical assault on the art market. A bit similar to when Wade Guyton went on Instagram to show himself mass-producing one of his "paintings" (made with an inkjet printer) after it had been sold for another record price. In both cases the ultimate effect – whether intended or not – is to boost interest for the artists, which in our society can immediately be valued in dollars. And who is gaining from selling works which appreciate in value? Sotheby's and Christie's – the companies who had supposedly been pranked.

Banksy's painting is relatively small: 101 x 78 cm framed. In that frame a battery powered, remote control operated shredder unit has been hidden. According to the catalogue's decription, this work had been consigned by a collector who had acquired it in 2006. There is not a word about the machinery included in technical description. Yet, there's no way in the world that the ultraprofessional art handlers and experts at Sotheby's in New York did not know about the contraption and the plan in advance. I own a shredder myself: the mechanism is surprisingly heavy. I notice this each time I need to lift it up to empty the bucket from shreds. A professional who is handling art all day long (carefully moving and installing the valuable pieces, packing and unpacking them), will have an acute sense – in advance – of how heavy a piece is going to be, given the way it has been made and framed. The work in question here is framed with a mass-produced, fake gold frame. To imagine that nobody would have noticed there's something fishy about it is hilarious. Given Banksy's guerilla reputation, the extra weight of the frame (complete with a suspicious looking slit on the underside) could have been due to a hidden gas canister... or even explosives. Nobody would have bothered to check? Come on.
Should we care? Yes. In the current political climate, artists need to think hard about whom they choose to serve.

Over the last year the Swedish Academy has debased itself in a most painful way, after
the husband of one of it members was accused of using his connections for serial sexual harrassment crimes and worse. The man in question has now been sentenced for rape. The other day the badly damaged institution managed to overcome its self-inflicted chaos and select two new members. One jurist (which they sure need) and one poet, Jila Mossaed, born 1948 in Teheran and exiled in Sweden since the mid 1980s, where she is now a major poet also in her adopted language. I don't much read poetry and do not know her work, but from the interviews and texts I have read about her, she seems to be a great choice, who can hopefully help saving this institution from its own worst instincts. In one interview I read this (my translation):

"I read in three languages and love poetry. Over time, it's gotten harder to care for fiction, the older I get. It hurts not to read the truth about what's happening. We are heading back to a wildness in the world, empathy is missing, too much is about owning and enjoying. (...)"

"With all respect for novelists, I think poetry comes from the heart. You can not lie in poetry, it must be rooted in love, in pain, in injustice. It is responsible for asking the most important questions about life and the world."

It is not post-modernism.

September 30, 2018  "Interview"
It has been impossible to ignore the rumbling American disaster during the past week, with much attention focused on the credible, though impossible to prove, accusations of sexual violence against the president's current candidate for the Supreme Court. In any ordinary interview situation this judge would have made himself impossible for whatever job in question, by the way he has defended himself so far. One can only hope that this public exposure of shamelessness will have consequences, in the world's oldest democracy.

Friday night I watched the film "Train to Busan" again, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It is very scary and very timely. Yet, as goes for all art which really works, it also confers hope. Somehow.

September 21, 2018  "Dot"
We humans like to believe there is a point at which it all converges. That we as individuals – or groups – have at least an inkling on where this point is situated. Some argue that there are "alternative facts", but this is mainly to be seen as a cover for that the "fact" that they chose as their convergence point, was selected based on questionable criteria. And that they are aware of this.

Earlier this year, in spring, I finished a
commission for the new canteen of a school in Gothenburg, Sweden. A couple of weeks ago I uploaded a documentation to this site.

The pupils of the Rosendal school are between 7 and 12 years of age. When they eat their free lunch they make a lot of noise. I was asked to create a wall which would be an art work and which would also be sound-absorbing. For this reason I chose to work with acoustic bricks, i.e. bricks with a multitude of holes which are directed outwards (behind the bricks is soft absorption material). I found a brickworks in Germany which could produce these bricks in glaces selected by me and I knew from the beginning that I wanted to incorporate mosaic as well. I did this by creating "fake" bricks, which are mosaic depictions of acoustic bricks, where colours have been freed from the restraints of the real bricks. These "pictures" were made by Svenja Teichert and Giuseppe Fornasari of Cosmomusivo in Berlin, who were given loose watercolours I had created based on the hole pattern of the "real" acoustic brick – which they were told to faithfully copy in glass mosaic. The fake bricks are inserted here and there in the wall, and form a cluster at its centre. During the process I also started experimenting whith depicting the hole-bricks in ceramics and porcelain, as we have a great ceramics workshop at the university in Vienna. A number of these creations also went into the wall. In the middle of its fifteen meters is an "eye" or a "target" which at its centre has one single "dot" of dark red "spagetti" mosaic glass. I never thought of explaining it like this before, until I started writing this note, but that core dot may be the single piece of insight left to hold onto, when existence is full of holes and discussion has become a wall of noise.But then I do like to propose alternative facts, regarding the meaning of my work.

September 18, 2018  "Animation"
For the first time in a long while, I have added a GIF-animation to this site. I have no clear idea when was the last time, but suppose it might be not far from twenty years ago. It's interesting to notice that this simple technique stays relevant, and that the little application I used, behaved just like I remember from last time, even though so much has changed since. It's the thirty "Psycho-Mapping East Asia" maps which gradually change, until they reach the colored rendering of the last drawing, taken from the banner. Here there is stillness, for all of six seconds.

September 16, 2018  "03:50:54"
I'm surprised about today's result in the Berlin Marathon. For the first time since 2013 I'm again below four hours. I had begun to get used to this being no longer achievable, but wrong I was. What's even more surprising is that this time I managed to run at almost exactly the same pace throughout all of the 42 km. It differs 10 seconds between my slowest 5 km and my fastest. The fastest being at the very end. The conditions were 100 % perfect and Eliud Kipchoge set a new world record with 02:01:39, which is an unbeliavable feat: his pace through the race was 20.81km an hour. Try reaching – holding– that speed during 50 meters, most of us can't. It's always a special feeling to having competed in a race where the winner set a world record. It has happened a few times to me, as I tend to run in Berlin. We were all in it together, some 45.000 individuals from 140 nations. One of us was faster than the others., indeed faster than anyone has ever been, on the distance. Being there, alone in the mass for almost 4 hours (in my case), there are two major experiences I make: one is observing humanity, the other is being at the most intimate with the possibilities and limitations of my own body.

September 14, 2018  "Say Sue Me"
One week ago exactly, I saw a band play in Busan, at the party after the press view of the Biennale, the day before the opening.

We're in the courtyard of the former bank building, which serves as one of the venues. Great Korean craft beer and lots of food. People eager to talk and socialize with one another. Everyone happy and proud of the show, which is now – almost – installed. There's a small stage with some gear as well, I notice as I arrive a little late. Half an hour later four people get up and begin to play, without a word of greeting. I have no idea who they are. Playing at a small party is not the hottest gig in the world, so for all I know they might be some hobbyists from around the corner. Only, they don't sound like that. From the first song, I'm caught up in the music. I leave my place in a corner and park myself right in front of the stage to listen. A kind of surf music with occasional outbursts of distortion, a singer who manages to be simultaneously shy and magnetic: almost wooden and yet totally engaging. The playing pure, sophisticated, simple and perfectly versed in the whole history of electric cool. It's such a great concert! Yet hardly anyone is paying attention, except for myself and Jörg Heiser, one of the curators. He found them on the internet, he tells me. After the last song we both go up to the singer to express our praise. I ask her whether they have done any records? Yes. Are they available? Yes. What's their name? She helps me spell into my phone: S A Y S U E M E.

Later that night, back at the hotel, I go online and find that not only have they two albums and several singles, but these have been reviewed all over the place and best of all: in less than a month Say Sue Me will tour Europe for the second time this year! And I will get to see them again, at home, in Berlin.

And yes, for the past week I have hardly listened to anything else. Beautifully textured and melancholic, with minimalistic but gripping and personal lyrics sung in a delightful English, sometimes oddly phrased: this music is right here, right now.

September 06, 2018  "Fear"
Today my Psycho-Mapping series was installed in the Busan museum: "Psycho-Mapping East Asia". Its last drawing – digitized, vectorized and once coloured – appears twice in the exhibition: as part of the series and outside, as the centerpiece of the giant billboard. Today is the day before the press view of a biennale... it's very hectic and I'm really happy that I'm done.

While I have produced a "psycho-mapping" of the geo-political situation in East Asia, there is a multiple psycho-mapping going on in real life, focused on the American chief executive (who, of course, is one of actors influencing the Asian arena). In the last few days it has reached fever pitch. Today I read with astonishment the transcript of a phone call between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward, regarding the latter's forthcoming book. It's a friendly call, made by DT. It is also perfectly chilling: I think everyone should read it.

Another must-read, which I wanted to point to for days, but forgot, appeared in Der Spiegel recently. It's a think piece by a German-Afghan woman named Zohre Esmaeli: "Nie gelernt, allein zu leben" (Never having learnt to live alone). Esmaeli arrived in Germany 20 years ago, as a teenager, and today she is a successful person with double national identities. In her text she explains better than anybody I have seen, the failures of both immigrants and natives to understand one another. And she points to how it could be different. It's a very important text. It should have been published in Sweden as well, before our fear-inducing elections on Sunday.

September 05, 2018  "Busan"
I spent the whole afternoon yesterday walking around Seoul with fellow Swede Gustav Hellberg, who is a professor at an art college on the outskirts of the metropolis. I hardly recognised anything since my last visit in 1998, it was fascinating. Today I arrived in Busan and took a taxi to the Museum of Contemporary Art. I didn't need to search for my billboard: the taxi stopped right beneath it. 216 square meters, my biggest picture so far. What a delightful sight!

September 04, 2018  "Divided"
I'm returning to South Korea for the first time since 1998, when I made a brief visit to check on the "Second Chimney" in Taejon (nowadays transcribed Daejeon) en route to Melbourne.
This time I will spend one day in Seoul, then take the train to Busan on Wednesday morning. It passes through Daejeon, but I will not stop, because since six to eight years (I don't know exactly) the Second Chimney is no more. Taking the "Train to Busan" is nevertheless most interesting, thanks to the eponymous political zombie film from 2016, which I highly recommend.

On Saturday, September 8, is the opening of the Busan Biennale 2018, with the title "Divided We Stand". I have made two works for it: a psycho-mapping series
of 30 drawings and a huge billboard for a wall outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, which is derived from the last of the drawings. It took weeks of hard work to perfect the vectorization of the ink drawing. When it was ready I had a small file which I emailed to Busan, where it should now have become something rather impressive. The title of the billboard is "Psycho-Mapping East Asia 2047". I'm expectant, excited and a little nervous.

September 03, 2018  "Mary"
One of the books I read this summer was "Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds", the original text with a great many creative footnotes, which use the text to address all sorts of current issues, while simultaneously proving how incredibly prescient Mary Shelley's novel is. I'd recommend it to anyone. It's hard to imagine that Shelley was not yet 20 when it was first published, having come up with the first idea a couple of years earlier. The book is two hundred years old now, yet it speaks to so many contemporary problems, projects and ideas.

Granted, Mary Shelley did not yet imagine electronic computers, but her scope is not that far from the accumulating tension in the discussions surrounding Artificial Intelligence. The other day a friend sent me the link to this article from the Guardian "Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code" and a little bit later, he asked me whether I think there is already computer conceived pop music out there? Pop music for 20-30 years now has been made by people using computers as tools, the question here is whether the machines and their algorithms have now mastered composition as well.

My answer, which is not based on specific research, is that: sure, there will be such pieces of music existing – but I very much doubt they have had any success. In the book I'm working on (currently layout stage, with the superb Theresa Hattinger): "Making Prints and Thinking About It", I address the discussion of "computer creativity" and conclude:

The great question is: Will there one day be a computer audience for computer expression? At that point everything will change.

August 29, 2018  "Fires"
What a summer it has been.
The heat. The drought. As a Swede, I'm more used to complaining about estival cold and rain, although personally I don't mind being inside reading when it's raining outside. This time no chance. In most of Sweden there was a complete ban on open fire. No grilling. Not even in your own garden. And no watering with a hose. Yellow lawns like hay, only very short.

Back in Berlin, this weekend Edvin had a local tennis tournament. It started early. Something had been forgotten and reluctantly I went after him to fix the problem, half an hour later. It was Saturday morning, much earlier than I would have been out otherwise. I felt happy I was though, there was something in the air. The sun was out, it was crisp, it was fresh. And something more, a distant scent, a fragrance, an ineffable something adding to the atmosphere of the moment. The first hint of fall perhaps. I thought of a Melbourne autumn morning. I did not know why, it just came to me. Soon I was back in the apartment, the moment over.

In the evening I told Edvin about my impression. That Melbourne thing, he helped me understand what it was. There had been a forest fire outside of Berlin. The wind had brought its odor. Nice at first, he said, but they had gotten tired of it as they played.

In 2010 Tom Nicholson had taken me to see what was left after the vast forest fires which killed so many people the year before. The eucalyptus still standing, blackened. That smell. It came back to me in Kreuzberg, in disguise.

July 24, 2018  "Books"I moved all my art books from one room in the apartment to another. Teenage son needs more space. It wasn't even all art books, as I have more scattered in Sweden and Vienna, but my general library of books related to individual artists, started in 1977. The idea has been... never to throw one away, just like in principle I keep all photos (although here some culling does take place, but it's a small percentage). You never know when one book (or photo) will show itself to be useful... and then one day there are 15 meters of them. Most of them obviously not very useful, except as a cumulative mirror to one's life. Please excuse the mixed metaphor. To experience the mirror in a physical way is educative.

June 14, 2018  "Bio"
In Vienna I have become good friends with Ingeborg Reichle, who, among many things, has a specialist interest in BioArt. Two days ago she the artist Reiner Maria Matysek to present his work, an event I attended. Afterwards there was a group of us continuing to talk for a couple of hours, over lemonade and Apfelsaft gespritzt on a terrace. It had been a very interesting lecture which inspired a wide range of arguments, and not just about art. For now, I just want to make a note of one observation (new to me) and one argument (which I have thought about for some time), both which continue to percolate in my mind. The observation is simple but fascinating:

– if one life form chooses to make art (an activity not necessary for survival) using other life forms as material, this is a colonial practice.

The argument is, at least at first glance, much more dramatic:

– if one day there is a proven breakthrough in bio-technical research (very well funded and the focus of a lot of interest) making a substantial extension of the human life span possible through some sort of therapy, then democracy is doomed.

There was also something frankly weird about an American president savaging Canada’s prime minister one day and then embracing the leader of the most totalitarian country in the world.

“He’s a very talented man,” Trump said of Kim. “I also learned that he loves his country very much.”

In an interview with Voice of America, Trump said “I like him” and added: “He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country.”

Trump praised Kim in the news conference and, astonishingly, even adopted North Korean positions as his own, saying that the United States military exercises in the region are “provocative.” That’s a standard North Korean propaganda line. Likewise, Trump acknowledged that human rights in North Korea constituted a “rough situation,” but quickly added that “it’s rough in a lot of places, by the way.” (Note that a 2014 United Nations report stated that North Korean human rights violations do “not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”)

Incredibly, Trump told Voice of America that he had this message for the North Korean people: “I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them. He wants to do right by them and we got along really well.”

It’s breathtaking to see an American president emerge as a spokesman for the dictator of North Korea.

June 10, 2018  "Norms"
I wake up to the news that the American President has de-authorized his signature on the G7 document, from his plane on the way to Singapore. In other words, he has broken with the US' closest group of allies, the leading democratic countries of the world. Now he is on his way to a one-on-one negociation on June 12 with the leader of the least democratic country in the whole world, the murderous dictator Kim Young-Un. If you simplify somewhat, there are two possible outcomes. The most likely is that they come to no agreement whatsoever, alternatively that the American president is first led to think they have an agreement on something (which he trumpets) after which it quickly falls a part. The other possible outcome is that they actually make a historic agreement, which does not immediately fall apart.

The result of the first outcome will be a heightening of tensions between two nuclear powers, with unforeseeable consequences, as the two thin skinned leaders move to compensate their loss of face in front of the world (one of them, the more obviously incompetent, having said of himself innumerable times that he is a master deal maker, which he will then have proven twice wrong on a worldwide scale, in less than a week).

The result of the second outcome will be just as unpredictable and very possible: worse. It will state that the United States of America is happy and willing to work with and trust the worst bad faith dictatorship in the world while sabotaging all efforts to negociate forward looking policy and agreements with its hitherto closest group of good faith democratic friends.

In my native country Sweden, for the last ten years or so, well meaning, good faith efforts to achieve equality between individuals: between men and women, between people from different ethnic backgrounds, with different sexual identities, etc, has sponsored discussion everywhere in society on how traditional "norms" are detrimental to true equality and must therefore be changed. This is all very well and valuable. However, Sweden being a highly consensus oriented culture with a high level of trust in authority, "norm criticism" (a direct translation from Swedish, a quick google search revealed there is no immediate parallell in English to the terminology now used in Sweden) has also been decreed in various state frameworks for pedagogy, cultural politics and politics. This is dangerous – because we need norms.

The American president has been teaching all of us a master class in "norm critical" behaviour ever since he first started his campaign (when he was not taken seriously by most) until now, when his continuing disregard for "norms" is growing ever more radikal. Democracy is a norm which should be supported, not undermined. Showing respect for your good faith friends, is another.

Anyone with imagination should be worried about what could take place in Sweden after this year's parlamentary elections if there is an upset (which doesn't look completely impossible, given the present political chaos) and the nationalist Sweden Democrats enter government. Imagine how state imposed "norm criticism" will look when government is radically right wing.

June 8, 2018  "Words"
I have been working with Chris Barber on the final tuning of the text I started to write already last summer. I never spent such a long time being involved with the same text. It's a great experience, you have the chance to ponder every word. Not under pressure, allowing the process to play out.

Today, returning from Vienna, I see that Anthony Bourdain has died. It feels sad, I remember reading his book not long after it came out, and that I liked it. I read about him now in the airport, and I learn that he got his first break as a writer (instead of as cook) when he sent an unsolicited text to the New Yorker. It's highly unusual they would publish something just sent in, but here it happened. I look this first text up, it's called "Don't eat before reading this" and it was published in 1999. I read it, and it is absolutely brilliant. About food and cooks and restaurant shenanigans, of course, but it's greatest asset is the way the words follow upon each other and the way they rhyme with each other, and basically just create a symphony of different sorts of "sense". It's very inspiring. How sad that he is gone.

June 4, 2018  "Metal"
I saw Babymetal in Music Hall in Innsbruck.

May 21, 2018  "Psycho-"
In order to illustrate and feed the anxiety I expressed in the post below, go to New York Times and read this article. Then continue with your work. There is no other way.

May 18, 2018  "Mapping"
Two nuclear powers. One enormously powerful is led by an old president who doesn't read or listen and is unable to distinguish between his own fragile sense of self and the independent reality surrounding him. The other, utterly poor in every sense except the existence of the bombs, is led by a young hereditary dictator, who has surprised all observers by his cold and murderous ruthlessness in securing and manifesting power. These two are supposed to meet in less than four weeks. The old guy has trumpeted success in advance. The younger one has been prepared for the task over three generations, and conceivably cannot – under any circumstances – give the old one what he wants. But he can make it look that way, for a while. What will happen when the old man realizes he has been played? Meanwhile, in my studio, I am busy mapping the development. Psycho-Mapping East Asia. The outcome is unclear.

April 13, 2018  "Scare"
I had to get up really early, to take a red-eye flight from Vienna to Paris. My dear friend Anne was going to defend her PhD thesis on the writings of Walker Evans, the photographer.

When it comes to text, Anne is the most exacting and demanding person I know. She is simply incredibly precise. And she never gives up. Which was a reason for worry, when she told me some years ago that she had signed up for a PhD and was going to do it on Evans' writings. The choiceof subject was a little bit surprising, as it used to be Robert Frank who was her number one photography interest. Yet Walker Evans originally intended to be a writer and this made him particular in this context.

The session took place in a very un-romantic teaching room in Université Paris 7 Diderot, in the 13 arr. I was going to stay only one night in a hotel by Place Italie and had only my rucksack, with computer and a change of clothes. I brought it all with me to the defence, which was scheduled to take up to five (5) hours. When I had first read this on the invitation I thought it sounded crazy – and it made me really curious. There were seven experts involved, four professors in the room, one on audiolink from Rennes, one head of photography at a famous American museum on videolink and another American professor at Yale, also on videolink. The two latter, major experts on Walker Evans.

I had never been present at a French doctorial defense before and didn't know exactly what to expect. Lots of words, I assumed. And indeed, the French experts each gave very lengthy statements which were primarily concerned (it seemed to me, but of course I may have missed nuances) with creating their own rhetorical beauty... I was not very surprised. Yet the two American participators (the first one of them actually French, though transplanted) had another approach. They adressed the matter in a more direct way, it seemed to me. One of them, who had been responsible for the Walker Evans show at the Pompidou last year, for which Anne had also served as a consultant, said that with this thesis Anne has proven herself to be France's foremost expert on Walker Evans' life – and that there is actually no one in the US who knows more, either. Which in this context should mean... the world. Not bad! And what a monumental effort it is. The thesis consists of four volumes, one of them 800 pages... in that volume alone almost 3000 footnotes.

After more than four hours of intense listening, the process was finished and the verdict proferred. We all had a glass in a room nearby and then split. I was completely exhausted, having not had much sleep the night before. I drifted slowly in the direction of my hotel and stopped at an italian pizza place "au feu de bois". My expectations were not high but I was served the most exquisit pizza Regina, with a perfect balance between all parts. With a glass of Saumur Champigny, which I like to order when in Paris. It was so nice. Just so right. What a beautiful evening.

Then I asked for the bill – and couldn't find my wallet. First I took it easy: my rucksack was over full, it must be there, somewhere. But the more I looked, the more worried I got. Yes, I got REALLY worried. Alone in Paris with no money and all my cards and papers lost somewhere in the big city. Not fun at all.

Finally I called for the manager, to say I couldn't find my wallet and couldn't pay. He switched from friendly to implacable in one go. I can't blame him, but it certainly wasn't nice to be on the receiving side in this moment. I would have to organize the money, leave my telephone as a forfeit if I left my table – and it was not his problem. I wanted to call the police. It was not his problem. He was just waiting for his money.

It was such an uncomfortable situation to be in. It made me see the fragility in the way we live our lives and what we take for granted. I was sitting there quiet and desperate, surrounded by other guests, all minding their own business. Just like I had when passing those beggars on the street earlier. My only option was to call Anne although she had deserved to be left in peace. Yet I did and she declared she would come to bail me out (Paris being big, that would be an hour perhaps). I then made a final desperate dig in my overflowing rucksack, and... found the wallet.

March 21, 2018  "Facebook"
If you read Swedish, I suggest you read this rundown of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. It's a succint point by point analysis, with links, of the different aspects of the unraveling data disaster. Then leave Facebook. If you feel you can't, stop liking. Stop feeding the monster.

March 18, 2018  "Freedom"
I am finishing the manuscript for my book about printmaking. At least that's what I hope. I mentioned it here for the first time in July last year. I never before spent such a long time on one text, I think. It has not been a continous writing process and I have been led off on various tangents through books which I've come across and felt inspired to read. That in itself, has been a good thing, of course. I can only hope I will be able to convey some of it to my readers eventually (publication is set for 2019). In a book I recently read, by an author I had never encountered before (I have already forgotten what led me to it or her), I read:

There is a real investment made by many of us today in the idea that artistic practice was liberated when judgments of both taste and politics ceased to be the criterion for (good) art. But there has been a price, and it is artists who pay it — although the opposite might at first appear to be the case. The contemporary art world values artists, not art. No art objects are necessary. No social or political usefulness is required. Artistic practices have been deregulated. They are strategies chosen by artists themselves as an expression of their individual and uncensored freedom. Artists are iconic embodiments, almost advertisements, for the slogan (if not the reality) of 'freedom of speech'. I say not the reality, because to a significant degree it is the museum, the curatorial decision, and the biennials that legitimate the artists, and on which they (un-freely) depend.

One page later, Susan Buck-Morss continues:

In short, artistic 'freedom' exists in proportion to the artists' irrelevance. Whereas in Dada, meaninglessness was located in the artwork in a way that reflected critically on social meaning itself, now meaninglessness is bestowed upon the artist, whose critical and creative powers are kept isolated from social effect.

The task we have, in all simplicity (it is not simple), is to fight the meaninglessness that is being bestowed on us.

March 13, 2018  "Busan"
With all eyes on North Korea I will return to the South in September, for the first time since 1998. A few days ago I was invited to be part of the Busan Biennale. I will work with psycho-mapping. It's fitting.

On the one hand it's quite a short time for preparing a major biennale work. On the other – given the crazy world we live in right now – it feels like a very long time until September. Anything can happen.

March 12, 2018  "Aura"
I have been doing office work at home the whole day. Paper, computer, paper. At one point my eyes fell on an object so familiar that often I don't see it: an old fashioned flat iron, with traces of a line of tacks, which once were glued to its flat surface.
I found and bought this object in Aix-en-Provence, I think in 1979. As soon as I was home again, I glued the tacks to it, and voilà: I now had a very convincing Man Ray: "Le Cadeau". Fantastic! It was even exhibited in a Man Ray exhibition once, at Lunds Konsthall 1986. Juliet Man Ray was present: she liked it. I thought: how brilliant it is, that this artist could conceive an idea which anyone can do, and they will all enjoy the aura of the original.

At some point, the tacks fell off. I glued them back. Then one day, maybe after a move, I didn't. It's a long time ago. It doesn't matter. The aura remains. Genius.

March 9, 2018  "First Aid"
We wake up to the news that the American president will meet with the North-Korean leader. It never happened before. What should be good news, does not convince, due to the nature of the two figures involved. What will be the reaction of the American, when he realises he is not getting what he wants (and not getting the press he craves)? When he starts thinking he is being played? When it is clear to everyone that he is being played? Which is the most likely outcome, given the personality and diplomatic incompetence of the person.
Music is more important to me right now, than
it has long been. I move from one favourite band to another, spending an intense period of infatuation with each one, until the next beckons. Since summer I have been though three: a contemporary Swedish indie band with an early 80s feel followed by another Swedish group, this one masked and satanic, and currently I'm all in for kawaii metal. Don't ask. One can always come back to a favourite band, even if it has been superseeded. Deep friendship stays. An album is announced, or a tour, usually both. It gives rhythm to the every day.

Last night K and I went to see First Aid Kit in a sold out Columbiahalle. The two sisters and their band of three bearded men were brilliant. So in command, so cool, so musical. Singing like goddesses. They even make me like country & western. At one point Klara was given a Telecaster by her guitar tech and suddenly she was playing angry garage with a feminist message. Totally in command. Johanna now plays bass guitar instead of basslines on her keyboard, like she did until recently. It's a great development.

Change is possible. Believe in it.

March 5, 2018  "Veil"
I avoid talking about students' work here. It's not the right place, because it is my place. However, no rule is good which doesn't sometime have an exception. I visited the St. Michael's Church today, at Michaelerplatz in the heart of Vienna. This is where Adolf Loos built his a building at the beginning of the last century, chocking the good burgers in this baroque city with a facade without ornament. A huge scandal – and a building which became an inspiration to modernism. In the 800 year old church... was held Mozart's funeral, during which his Requiem was performed for the first time (the parts which had been finished). And now, until the end of Lent, is hanging a Lenten Veil in front of the baroque Altar. It was painted by Zhanina Marinova in January, on the floor in a cold temporary studio space. She had ten days. It is 11 x 5 meters. It is absolutely fascinating to look at. And for me to consider: how did I become involved in this?

February 18, 2018  "Wall"
Since three days I'm in Gothenburg, Sweden, where I am assisting bricklayer Dan Ahlgren in building a huge image as a wall of acoustic bricks, with inlays of mosaic and ceramics. It's a public art commission for the canteen of a new school building. It's the first time that I have the possiblity to work with bricks in a non-tower context. It has allowed me to learn about acoustic bricks (a condition for the commission); to find a brickworks (Janninhof, in Münster) which could glace their bricks in different colours; to be able to have mosaics produced for me for the first time (by comsomusivo in Berlin) and also to make ceramic/porcelain parts myself, in the university workshop in Vienna. Now Dan and I (we got to know each other at the Uppsala chimney site) are working long days to make the plans reality. So far, reality is looking real good. And we are having fun, listening to music a lot: Ghost, Johnny Cash, First Aid Kit, Shonen Knife and Babymetal.

February 14, 2018  "Clear"
Today I listened to an interview with one of my intellectual heroes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The way she talks... the way she strings words together, one after another, is so utterly sharp and clear and easy to follow – and with her particular combination of pride and humour – that I come away feeling there is hope, after all. Really smart people are easy to understand. They speak when they have something important to say. Chimamanda does. She is on a stage with David Remnick (who is rather smart as well), you can hear 19 minutes here.

Soon after, I was sent a link to an interview with a German filmmaker, Sebastian Schipper (who I didn't know before). It's about the #metoo debate, which in Germany and Austria hasn't got very far. Schipper is super clear, as well. Another pleasure.

January 17, 2018  "Adulterated"
Last spring I was invited to write a text for an anthology on the future of Artistic Research, to be published by the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, where I taught 2007-2009. I'm not a fan of the mainstreaming of this discipline, yet I agreed. I always feel curious what will come out, when I accept a writing assignment. Some time later I received, along with the other writers, a set of seven questions written in IAE.

My attitude towards Artistic Research is critical, although I have been reluctantly involved with this scene for more than ten years now. Back in 2009, I published a text in Art&Research called "The Writing Artist" where I warned of the risk that, given a certain development, "the rest of the university will increasingly see artistic research as a joke". Well, there has been no "all clear" sent so far. Having said that, every once in a while there is interesting stuff coming up. But these efforts risk remaining hidden between other texts which seem not to having been read closely, even by the people who wrote them.

Thinking about what to write for the anthology, I thought about the self-confirming character of the questions. I decided to make one of them the focus of my text, in order to point out how important it is – especially now, in the era of Trump – to be careful with how you use language. I wrote my text "Alternative Knowledge" in a rather high-pitched way. I weighed every word, while analysing the question I had chosen.

In order to keep control of my text, written in English, I commissioned the brilliant Vienna copy editor Christopher Barber to correct the final draft. As anyone reading this self-edited "Talk" column will know, I don't write English without fault. Chris helped to polish my text to perfection. I emailed it to one of the editors, explaining that its language had already been fine-tuned by a professional. "Please don't change anything", I wrote.
Some weeks ago I received the book, titled "Futures of Artistic Research". I had so many other books going, it first landed in a pile. Today I felt like reading my own text, to see how it holds up. The first thing I notice, is that my name has been misspelt in a striking way. I then see a totally unmotivated word has been added to the first sentence, destroying it. A similar addition to the second sentence destroys it as well. Later in the text a sentence has been re-written by somebody adding a grammatical horror.

This done to a text on the necessity of being precise with language! It's awful. The problem is, I think, and have already stated, that very few people can be bothered to actually read texts of/on Artistic Research. Is it too much to ask of a book's editor, that they do?

Now, for those of you who may want to read my text in its unadulterated state, it is available here.

January 8, 2018  "Start"
A few days into the new year, my father's funeral took place. That's where I have to start, this time.